When comparing Yii vs Fat-Free Framework, the Slant community recommends Fat-Free Framework for most people. In the question“What are the best PHP frameworks?”Fat-Free Framework is ranked 2nd while Yii is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose Fat-Free Framework is:

The framework is very lightweight and fast. Even though it's pretty light, it still does not lose a lot of functionality.

Pros

Pro

Comes with important security standarts

Since security is a crucial part of any application, Yii comes with great security features out of the box to help developers create a secure and reliable application. These security features contain but are not restricted to:

Pro

Integrated with a testing framework

Yii makes use of Codeception, a great PHP testing framework that helps developers run their tests. They can be unit, functional or acceptance tests since Codeception supports them all.

Pro

Lots of plugins available

Yii has about 2000 addons hosted on Yii's official website. These addons significantly decrease development time and increase the developer's efficiency.

Pro

License

Yii is free and open source and is distributed under the BSD License.

Pro

Strong community support

Yii has a strong and rather large community behind it. This is proven by the great number of blog posts, tutorials, guides and reviews on the Yii framework as well as the great number of extensions developed for it.

Pro

Easy to install

Yii uses Composer to handle it's dependency installation. This is rather easy and not very time consuming, although it should be noted that Composer is very resource-intensive considering what it's job is. But that is not really Yii's fault.

Pro

Best framework for CRUD operation

Yii Framework Provides most of features require for crud functionalities like GridView, Listview and DetailView (with jquery search and validation functions) by generating using GII.

Pro

Highly extensible without effort

Pro

Lightweight without losing functionality

The framework is very lightweight and fast. Even though it's pretty light, it still does not lose a lot of functionality.

Pro

Highly modular

Virtually everything is modular. You can choose which modules and libraries to include and to keep the framework as lightweight as possible.

Pro

Shortened development time

Building an application that processes a URL (display a page, submit a form, invoke Ajax, etc.) requires very little code and can be achieved very quickly. Allows developers to focus on the application itself and not the plumbing.

Pro

Comprehensive documentation and API reference

Pro

Very stable

You know those frameworks that have updated 5 times during your own development phase? Well, F3 sees one or two updates per year. Never had any issues updating or upgrading. F3 just works.

Pro

Easy to get started

After you download the framework it is very simple to get an app up and running very quickly. Makes it easy for newer PHP and web app developers to start using a MVC framework.

Pro

ORM supports sql, nosql, and jig

Pro

No canned coding/directory structure

Freedom to structure your projects' directories and codes as you wish.

F3 is a non-opinionated framework : you are entirely free to use the files/API/assets structure that you love.

Following a minimalistic approach, F3 tends to avoid adding code and structure that are not strictly necessary, while focusing on what really matters : coding your solution; actually you learn F3 while implementing/coding your project/webapp

Pro

Multiple view engines

Default view engine is superb and can also work with varieties of PHP view engines including Twig.

Pro

Self documenting code

Pro

Simple development set up

Pro

Unit testing toolkit

Pro

FREE structure

Pro

No composer, curl or dependency injectors

You download a zip file and use it by placing require(); statement. No need to use composer, curl or any dependency injector which sometime become a great pain.

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Cons

Con

Can be hard for beginners

Since Yii requires developers to write code following certain rules, or in other words, it requires developers to follow the "Yii way of doing things" it can be hard for beginners to warm up to it and start using it right away.

Con

Not very good at many to many relations

(but there is a good plugin, namely CAdvancedArBehavior extension to do this)

Con

Default ORM doesn't support joins

The default ORM for this framework is missing some features such as joins. But it's important to keep in mind that it's a small plugin, only 23KB in size which still can be replaced with a larger ORM if needed.

An alternative the drop in f3-cortex ORM which is popular, and supported by the community, which supports Joins and much more.

Con

The default template engine is "home made"

Con

Requires front-end stack support

As often used with a .js framework or libraries there is a need for a combined workflow. For example, a workflow using laraval-mix+ nom.

Con

Backward incompatible within minor version

There are serious incompatibilities even between minor versions (eg. between 3.6.0 and 3.6.2). Developers exhibit complete lack of understanding what is versioning of product (and which changes should be integrated in which versions), which makes this framework unsuitable for serious work. Development is slow, stable versions are rare and not treated seriously.

Con

Lack of video tutorials

While there is a great user guide, compared to other established PHP frameworks, there is a relative shortage of video and written step-by-step tutorials for newbies to learn this framework.

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